Hector Ortiz is 18 years into a 26-year prison sentence. Every person in prison is a human being with a story about how they got there, and Ortiz puts every detail of his on display here—every childhood trauma, every violent incident, every bad choice—en route to offering forgiveness to the younger self who couldn’t see another way to cope with the pain and finding accountability for the pain inflicted on others. This letter to his younger self isn’t always easy to read, but we call them “hard truths” for a reason.
Your family has just gotten a phone, a landline, and your dad teaches you how to make a collect call from a payphone. But why would you ever need to? He doesn’t trust people, so you never get to go anywhere. But one day, you and Ernest stay after school to play ball. When you’re done, you begin to walk toward home, but it’s too far. You stop by the store to use the phone, but you forget how to make a collect call. You and your brother decide to walk to your aunt and uncle’s, where you show up crying because you are so panicked about how far you are from home. They don’t have a phone either, so they calm you and put you to bed.
Sometime early in the morning, you wake up as you’re flying through the air and are slammed into the concrete floor of the basement. After your initial scream, your aunt yells at your dad from the top of the stairs: “ERNIE! What are you doing down there?” He wakes up your brother and slaps you upside the head and tells you both to put your shoes on and get in the van. Because Dad is a carpenter, he has a pile of 18-inch steel stakes in the van. As he’s driving down the canyon to your house, he periodically picks one up and hits you on your legs and knees. You scream and cry until you get in the driveway.
You still have to go to school the next day, the day of the school carnival. You can barely get out of the van. Some of your classmates are running around and jumping to touch the rim of the basketball hoop. You wish you could join them, but your body is too beat down. All that fun, and nobody knows how much pain you are in. It sort of feels like that all the time. Being beaten like that doesn’t allow your little mind to consider the fear or worry your parents must have had the night before, when you didn’t come home. The pain never lets you consider others, never lets you apologize for the things you do. There’s just too much pain.
